Practical strategies for the role of digital in your business

Value of directories

A client asked me the other day if submitting your website to 1000-s of directories was still useful?

For those that do not know what this questions means; one way to get links to your site is to submit your site to as many directories as you can find. In the offline world you might only refer to Yellow Pages, but online there are more directories than you can poke a stick at. If some (or all) of the directories provide a link to your site, then that is something many marketers (should) want. Links to your site are like a vote of confidence, not just to prove you exist but also to say you are “alright”. If you get lots of votes, your site will be easier to find and appear higher on the google page. There are many strategies to get these votes (links), and directory submissions is one of them.

The short answer could be, “no it hardly seems worth it”. Submitting your site to a directory is insanely time consuming (as I strongly advise against automated tools) and the success rate of directory submissions is only 7%. Pretty shocking right?

Best course of action would be to only choose worthwhile directories. Ones that are highly rated and have a high Page Rank themselves (like Yahoo, True Local, BOTW, Hotfrog etc) and ones that are specific to your industry. Relevance and authority are key.

However, you need to also consider this. The algorithm would be suspicious if all your links came of sites that have a PR of 7 and higher. Links need to look organic and realistic. So, yes your link profile needs to look “normal” Some links will be from low authority websites, some from high authority websites. Some links will be nofollow, most links would not.

So my conclusion is to only focus on the top few directory in your country or category. Your SEO efforts should be focused on producing valuable content and directory submissions take valuable content strategy time away from you.